Launched in August 2021, the e-Shram portal completed five years as India's first centralised national database for unorganised workers. It has registered over 300 million workers, assigning each a 12-digit Universal Account Number linked to Aadhaar. The portal is administered by the Ministry of Labour and Employment and enables portability of social security benefits. Workers registered automatically receive ₹2 lakh accidental insurance cover under PM Suraksha Bima Yojana, making it a critical financial inclusion instrument for India's informal labour force.

India's unorganised sector employs roughly 90% of its workforce, yet historically these workers lacked any verifiable identity for welfare delivery. e-Shram addresses this structural gap by creating a single, Aadhaar-seeded registry that cuts across occupational categories — construction workers, agricultural labourers, domestic workers, street vendors, and gig workers alike.

The portal's core mechanism is the Universal Account Number (UAN), a 12-digit identifier that travels with the worker across states and jobs — a portability feature modelled loosely on the EPF UAN for organised sector employees. This portability is the key policy innovation: it allows DBT (Direct Benefit Transfer) of scheme benefits to reach migrant workers regardless of where they are working at a given moment.

The embedded insurance linkage is equally significant. Registration automatically triggers coverage under PM Suraksha Bima Yojana, providing ₹2 lakh accidental death and full disability cover and ₹1 lakh for partial disability, with the premium subsidised by the government. This is a convergence model — one registration, multiple scheme benefits — that UPSC examiners test under governance efficiency frameworks.

For RBI and NABARD aspirants, the financial inclusion angle is primary: e-Shram is the demand-side infrastructure that makes last-mile banking and credit delivery to informal workers viable. Without a verified identity and income proxy, banks cannot extend PSL credit or Jan Dhan-linked products to this segment. The portal essentially converts invisible labour into documented economic participants.